Taliban, Al-Qaeda Awaiting U.S. Afghanistan Exit

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- The multipronged attack carried out
by a Taliban faction in Afghanistan last weekend, including
sustained raids in the capital’s diplomatic quarter and on
Parliament, was meant, the New York Times reported, to
“undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.”

Well, mission accomplished, as they say. Although Afghan
security forces, with help from NATO, eventually ended the
assault, the Taliban’s ability to penetrate Kabul, which has
been advertised as Afghanistan’s safest city, suggests a certain
tenuousness to the overall security situation.

And the attacks raise an overarching worry: that the Obama
administration, which is increasingly focused on withdrawing
from Afghanistan, is acting according to an arbitrary timetable
rather than conditions on the ground -- which is to say, whether
or not the Taliban is actually losing. In doing so, they seem to
be avoiding the hardest questions.

By this September, the administration plans to withdraw the
remaining 23,000 troops that were part of the “surge” ordered in
2009. A complete withdrawal is planned by 2014. The American
people, we have been told, are tired of spending money and lives
on the conflict formerly known as “the good war.”

The Hard Questions

But what will they think in 2015, if broad stretches of
southern and eastern Afghanistan have once again come under
Taliban control?

The ability of the American military and intelligence
community to monitor these areas will be enhanced, especially
compared with the pre-Sept. 11 era. The administration plans to
continue using drone strikes and small groups of special forces
to fight terrorism there. But what if that isn’t enough to keep
al-Qaeda -- which has been devastated, but not destroyed -- from
once again using these regions to train and to execute plots?

What will Americans think when they learn that many of
Afghanistan’s women have been forced back under the burqa, and
girls have been forced from schools built with U.S. tax dollars?
Why, they may ask, did we waste so many lives and so much money
in a conflict we decided we couldn’t win? Why did we stay in
Afghanistan for so long without a coherent strategy?

I asked a senior U.S. military official to explain how
we’ve reached the moment, after 10 years of war, when it seems
plausible that the Taliban could one day rule the very same
parts of Afghanistan they dominated before.

He proposed a modest counterfactual: Imagine, he said, if
Western leaders had announced in December 2009 that the surge
would come to an end not according to a predetermined timetable
but only when the Taliban had been defeated. Such steadfastness
could have caused the Taliban to quickly collapse.

Now, of course, the U.S. is encouraging negotiations with
the group it once sought to destroy.

The Obama administration’s goals seem muddled even to the
people who fund the war. Last week, I visited Representative
Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican and the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee. “The policy in Afghanistan is confusing
to me, and if it’s confusing to me, who does this every day,
it’s got to be confusing to someone whose primary responsibility
is to raise their family and go to work,” he said.

I asked Rogers what, specifically, he found so confusing.
His answer was pleasantly clear-cut. “The administration is
talking about negotiating with the very people we’ve been trying
to discredit for 10 years,” he said. “We’ve been trying to gain
the support of people who are scared to death of the Taliban,
and now they’re scared to death that we’re trying to bring the
Taliban back.”

‘We Were Winning’

Rogers, a former Army officer whose brother is a two-star
general, doesn’t think it’s too late to inflict a strategic
defeat on the Taliban. But he argues that this isn’t a goal
shared by the Obama administration. “We were winning on the
ground. I was one of the few who came out in favor of the
president’s surge. Yes, people say we’ve been there for 10
years, but it’s really been only since 2009. The surge is the
real date. We had good intel then that the Taliban commanders
were losing the fire in the belly. We saw what was happening,
but guess what? We brought them back to life -- we said we were
leaving, we don’t care what the circumstances are. It’s a well-known idea that you never go to war thinking that you can’t
win.”

The administration has been hinting lately that vital U.S.
interests are no longer at stake in Afghanistan. At the moment,
when al-Qaeda is mostly based in Pakistan, a putative American
ally, this argument has some merit. But Rogers argues that
premature withdrawal from Afghanistan could mean that parts of
it are eventually reconstituted as terrorist safe havens.

He also said something that, given his hardnosed
reputation, surprised me: The U.S. made a promise to
Afghanistan’s women, and we’re on the verge of breaking it.

“We said to these women that we’re with them,” he said.
“What are we saying to them now? I was in one of the first
congressional delegations into the country, and I met a woman, a
doctor, who spoke better English than I do. She has a U.S.
medical degree. She took me to her hospital, a children’s
hospital. She told me that when she first heard of the fighting
in 2001, she took off her burqa and walked something like 25 or
30 miles to the hospital. She had basically been a prisoner in
her husband’s house for three years, and now she was doing
surgeries.”

He continued: “And I get angry now because we’re walking
away from her. We’re inviting the people, the Taliban, back, the
very people who shoot people in soccer stadiums, who chop
peoples’ heads off. What message does that send to her? That she
might as well put on her burqa and walk back to her husband’s
house?”

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
national correspondent for the Atlantic. The opinions expressed
are his own.)

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